The Tapas Room

The Tapas Room isn’t easy to find, it’s tucked away behind a Tesco on the Battersea Park road and even if you are looking for it, locating it feels like something of an accomplishment. I like tapas, the sharing and the variety and so was keen to try this fairly recent opening, if we could find it.

Well, find it we did after a few false starts. The building is rather spare and functional, looking a bit like the cafeteria at a sixth form college. The interior was also rather bare, not unpleasant just without frills.

The menu was also concise with a mix of nibbles, cured meats, cheeses and tapas. The choice of tapas was limited to about 7 considered options including prawns, oxtail, goats’ cheese and others. It was all reasonably priced with the tapas rarely being over £7. The wine list though was a bit pricier with the average for a bottle about £30, but if you’d seen this elsewhere, you’d have thought it a good price.

That night I was dining with my old university friend, the politician, a man known for his decisiveness. He decided right away that he didn’t want to try the octopus, which was one of things I was looking forward to. The waiter also told us that the pork belly was off, but there was a salt cod replacement which I would have liked to try but was vetoed by my dining companion.

The wine came first and was a nice dry white rioja, with subtle flavours that would go with pretty much all the dishes we had chosen. We initially went for a mix of four dishes, the Serrano ham, goats’ cheese on beetroot salad, garlic king prawns and oxtail. These were all good, with only the Serrano ham feeling a bit generic, despite having the highest price tag.

Both the prawns and the oxtail came with enough sauce to make the deployment of dipping bread both necessary and desirable. For me the winner in the flavour steaks was the oxtail, which was rich and delicious, giving it the ring by a nose.

After the first round of food, we had a bit of an intermission, partly to allow digestion but also so that we could appreciate the wine a bit. We both felt that we could a few more calories and so went for the black rice with seafood and the selection of meats and cheeses.

The black rice was very good, tasting deliciously salty. There was nothing wrong the meats and cheese and indeed you got rather a lot for the price £14, but it was a tad generic, but then what could you expect.

The Tapas Room on the night we visited only appeared to have a staff of two. One to wait, one to cook and that perhaps explained the rather diminutive dining room. Both the waiting and the cooking were good and the bill when it came at £88 or only £25 each for food before service was pleasantly diminutive as well.

Now I’m not going to claim that the Tapas Room is groundbreaking in it’s authenticity, quality or value…but it’s a good find and if you a planning a night out in the environs of the Battersea Park road, I struggle to see a better option for a quick good value bite.

The Tapas Room

263-265 Battersea Park Rd, London SW11 4NE

https://www.thetapasroom.co.uk